Your Body Knows How to Heal — Stop Trusting the Diagnosis Over Yourself

When you've been through the medical system long enough, it's easy to let the diagnosis become the story you tell yourself. In this episode of The Weekly Recharge, Renae shares her ongoing back pain journey — including a spectacularly failed AI physical therapy experiment — and why she refuses to accept what the scans say as a final answer. She also gets into Dr. Joe Dispenza's work on self-healing, a breathwork experience that shifted something after three years, and what her dog Mookie's x-rays taught her about not letting a diagnosis become a sentence.

If you're a high achiever who has been told what you can't do, this one is for you.

Topics covered:

• Why high achievers over-identify with their diagnosis
• Dr. Joe Dispenza's books and the science of self-healing
• Nervous system regulation and somatic healing practices
• A simple looking-inward practice you can do today
• Why burnout recovery requires listening to your body, not fighting it

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the audio version of the weekly recharge newsletter. If you gandered over here from the Hustle Rebels podcast, hello. I invite you to subscribe to the weekly recharge newsletter where I dive a little bit more into the shit I encounter in my life to help you deal with some of the shit in your life with nervous system regulation techniques. The link is in the description, and otherwise, let's roll like my 36-pound Sheltie trying to get off the couch. What if the diagnosis just becomes the story that we tell ourselves? Some of the things that we're going to cover this week are the AI physical therapy experiment that went spectacularly wrong, why I don't accept my surgeon's diagnosis, and why Mookie doesn't either, Dr. Joe Dispenza, Breath Work, and the moment something actually shifted, and a somatic practice for turning inward towards what hurts instead of fighting it. Now, if you've been around here for a while, you know that the back pain saga has been running thread in my life. Surgeries, recovery, setbacks, the whole roller coaster. And honestly, at this point, I feel like I've just about tried everything. So when my health insurance sent me this AI physical therapy program, I thought, okay, maybe this is it. Maybe technology has finally caught up. Hell no. But to be fair, there is a real PT on the other side, somewhere, dictating my exercises like a reasonable human being. But the problem is that the tablet that's supposed to be tracking my movements, and I'll be honest with you, I have chonky legs. I own that, but this thing genuinely believed that my legs were bent during side leg lifts because of the chunk at my kneecaps. It was tracking like my fat at my knees, but not my form. And I cannot emphasize how horrendous this experience has been. We're just not doing this again. But there is something I genuinely keep coming back to, and it goes beyond bad tech. We are so conditioned to let the diagnosis become the story. We're actually obsessed with the diagnosis. Now, if you looked at my MRI, an orthopedic surgeon would tell you that I probably need a spinal fusion. In fact, he did say that, that if I went back to become a firefighter, I would eventually need a spinal fusion, that I shouldn't return to the lifestyle that I used to have, that my discs are too far gone. And I understand why they say that, because that's what the imaging shows. But I don't accept that as my destination. I know my body has more capacity than any scan can capture. And then there's Mookie. As many of you know, Mookie is my dog, my old girl, and lately on our walk, she's been wanting to be carried back, like the princess she absolutely believes that she is. Now I knew something was off. She's older, she's carrying some extra weight. So I finally got x-rays done on her back legs, and the radiology report read it like an absolute disaster. Fragmented broken bones, strained ligaments, and osteoarthritis, orthopedic specialists, possible surgery, the works. Meanwhile, during the day, you would never even know that she was in pain. Playing with Marley, getting around just fine, living her best life, as long as she's not on the slippery tile. They gave her carprofen, basically doggy ibuprofen. I actually cut the dose in half, just to start gently. And she is leaps and bounds different, moving like a young spry puppy, literally as if the diagnosis was written about a completely different dog. If I had let that report be the whole entire story, we might have gone straight to surgery for a dog who just needed some anti-inflammatory support and a little bit of grace. The diagnosis is information. It is not the census, it is not the sentence. And even as a paramedic, we are trained to treat the patient, not the monitor. And this is where Dr. Joe Dispens's work comes in. And if you haven't encountered his work yet, I genuinely, I'd genuinely recommend starting there. His books Becoming Supernatural, You Are the Placebo, and Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself puts serious weight behind the idea that we have so much more power over our own healing than we've been taught to believe. He talks about releasing the dis-ease within our body, and he's not speaking purely metaphorically. He was actually hit by a car going 60 miles per hour during a triathlon, then told he would likely never walk again, and he healed himself. Now that's not a metaphor. That actually happened. I've been sitting with his work a lot lately, slowly trying to convince myself, really convince myself, that I can heal. And then this weekend I went to a breathwork session, fire breathing, the kind of session where you're saying things to yourself almost hypnotically, over and over, that feels almost too big to believe. I can heal myself. I started that session sitting on the floor with my legs straight out in front of me, honestly wondering if I was going to last on the concrete for two to three hours. Couldn't sit crisscross applesauce. I haven't been able to for the last three years. By the end of the session, I could. When I tell you that I cried a little to myself the moment I bent my right hip in, it's literally not an exaggeration. I don't have a clean explanation for that. I'm also not going to pretend that I do. But something moved, literally and otherwise. And I'm not going to let the diagnosis talk me out of what I felt in my own body. So this week's practice is going to be the looking inward check-in. Now you don't need a breath work facilitator or a special session for this. You just need a few minutes and a willingness to get curious instead of combative with whatever your body is holding. So I want you to find a comfortable position, seated or laying down, close your eyes and take three natural breaths. Not deep forced breaths, just yours that feel natural to you. And then do a slow scan from the top of your head down to your feet. You're not looking to fix anything yet. You're just noticing. Where's the tension? Where's the tightness? Is there a dull ache? Something that's been there for so long that you've started to ignore it or think that's just always going to be there. And when you do find it, don't try to push it away. I want you to get curious about it. What does it actually feel like? What's the shape of it? What's the weight of it? If it could speak, what would it say to you? And place a hand there, if you can. Breathe toward it. Not to force it open, but just to acknowledge it. Just say to you whatever you might be feeling, I see you. I'm not fighting you. And just close with a simple intention, something quiet and true. Something like my body is doing its best, I'm not broken, and healing is possible. You don't even have to believe it completely yet. You just have to be willing to try it on. And the biggest thing, don't let your ego get in the way. Because if your brain thinks that something is stupid when no one else is listening, you're going to keep yourself from experiencing a whole hell of a lot. And then this week on the Hustle Rebels podcast, if you missed last week, last week's conversation with Kai Brown was such a great insight from a young entrepreneur with a grounded perspective. If you haven't listened to it yet, I highly recommend that you make time for it. And then this week, I'm dropping a solo episode that I want you to pay attention to because it's laying the groundwork for something bigger. The conversation coming the next week after goes into territory that I honestly think a lot of you are going to feel in your chest. We're talking about the invisible labor that women carry, the weight that doesn't show up on any job description or performance review and why so many high-achieving women are exhausted in ways that they can't quite name. The solo episode this week is the setup. So don't skip it. There's going to be links in the description and show notes so that you can watch it and listen to it. And then if you're new here or feeling nostalgic and you want to read some previous newsletters, there's also going to be links in the description as well. Until next week, keep turning inward. The answers that you have been chasing, they might already be there. So see you guys next week.